Glad to see industry adopting cloud server + ssh + code-server / code-remote as a standard. As a PhD student I have been working on HPCs like this with an environment I built myself for a while. It is really good and helps you to move fast.
It depends on latency. If you have a slow network connection (or are simply far away from the cloud data center) you are in for pain. That being said, running a local environment on a constantly throttling 2019 MacBook Pro that sounds like a jet engine is probably worse.
